I lost two friends this month. Gary died of brain cancer at age 53. Carmen (not her real name) is still alive, but our friendship of twelve years kicked the bucket. I mourn for both. But the grief process looked quite different.
Gary Albert was my husband’s boss for two decades. Aaron was a young 20-something computer programmer when Gary hired him to work at ActivTrax, which created fitness software. Gary exasperated me when Aaron and I started dating a decade ago. Gary phoned Aaron every time a server went down or a line of code had a glitch, weekends and nights. Aaron once had to fix a problem from a ski chairlift in Colorado. Aaron was a catchall IT gopher who wrote all the company’s software, ran the servers, and dealt with the Verizon guy when the wifi went down. But I soon learned his biggest job was talking Gary out of impractical ideas. Gary was a dreamer, a perfectionist, who did not accept defeat easily. But Aaron had worked for Gary for most of his 20s and 30s and a father-son bond forged. I understood that if I wanted Aaron, Gary came with the package.   Â
Six years later, just as Aaron and I were tying the knot, I finally got to meet Gary in the flesh. When my building at the NIH got renovated I designated Tuesdays as “Take Your Girlfriend To Work Day.†Aaron took me to his ActivTrax office so I could escape the dungeon basement where I had been temporarily relocated. ActivTrax became my home away from home, and Tuesday became my favorite (and most productive) day of the week. Gary was a cyclone of energy in the kitchen break room. I was blown away by his candor about challenges he was facing. I came from a family where men deny, deny, deny, because admitting to fault would make them look weak. I was stunned by a self-reflective man who could own his flaws and past mistakes and was actively self-improving. More often than not, when Aaron and I climbed into the Jeep after a long day at ActivTrax, I turned to him and said, “I like Gary.â€
Gary quickly became family after the birth of our son. Gary and his wife Maddie babysat Bjorn every Tuesday night so Aaron and I could keep up our weekly group run with the Woodley Ultra Society (WUS). When my father died when Bjorn was six months old, Gary filled in by taking me to sporting events that bored Aaron. Gary was horrified when I showed up to a Caps game not wearing a team jersey and spent the breaks enlisting every salesperson to find a Kuznetsov jersey in my size. We never found one (to my relief; I wasn’t raised to drop absurd amounts of cash on over-priced sports jerseys). When Aaron and I ran endurance races, Gary happily assumed the role of Number One Fan and occasionally Sponsor. He was more pumped about my races than I was. I did not realize I had voids in my life until Gary filled them. Â Â Â
Gary would have liked to have died a richer man, but instead he died a better man, in some ways a hero. Few men ever set on a path to redemption. It’s easier to bury heads in the sand, denigrate therapy, and task others to accept “who they are.” But Gary was the ultimate hustler. He put the same vim into fixing himself as he did into fixing everything else in his life – his company, his house, his relationships, and virtually every business system he ever encountered.
Gary was a lot. God bless Maddie. God bless Michelle, Louie, Aaron, and everyone else who worked at ActivTrax. Luckily I never had to work for Gary or satisfy his crazy demands. I was just an interloper who could enjoy his crass humor and unfiltered barbs. There were no walls with Gary. He waved me in to use his office massage chair, even when he was on business calls. I wish Gary were still around. But I feel comfort knowing that his species of men exist. I’ll spend the rest of my life searching for people like Gary. They won’t be easy to find. Â
* * *
By chance I encountered my friend Carmen on the same day that Gary died. I was grieving, my head was spinning, and I cannot remember a thing I blurted to her. But I recall that I was friendly, which was progress. Carmen and I had not spoken in six months, even though we lived ten minutes apart and had worked together for more than a decade as “work wivesâ€, leading side-by-side research programs and sharing postdocs and office space. We became good friends over years of traveling together to teach scientists around the world how to study infectious disease data. We were known for notoriously fast, disjointed conversations where we finished each other’s sentences because we intuitively guessed what the other was thinking, but left out so many words that no one else could follow the thread.
We had complementary skills at work, but also complementary personalities. She was the consummate diplomat in pink lipstick and heels and I was the blunt realist in track pants who blurted without filter. She could only do good cop, so I did bad cop. She was cautious and demure, but allowed me to drag her on thrilling adventures by foot, bike, ski, and boat. She rolled with it, even the time she got stranded on a rock surrounded by whitewater rapids and had to be rescued. I also enlisted her in my weekly pilates class, which we did together for years along with my mom. Over time we built a research group that was distinctly female dominated. I joked that it was a “safe house†for female computational biologists. Of everything I did at work, the achievement I am probably most proud of is that we built a research environment that was genuinely fun. Many women remained lifelong friends after they left. We all liked each other enough to vacation together in Puerto Rico and Bali.
But even the best relationships sometimes get seriously tested. The unraveling of my friendship with Carmen began shortly after I had a baby and became the only scientist in the group acquainted with morning sickness and breast pumps. For some reason when I returned to the office after my son’s arrival my boss had my number. He began to yell at me for no reason and threaten to end my employment. To say Carmen is not a fan of conflict is to say the ocean is not dry. Carmen had worked there longer than anyone and knew the ropes. She even served a year as interim director before the new boss arrived. Everyone looked to her for guidance, so every time she looked the other way my boss felt emboldened. Eventually he knew he could get away with anything. Which he did, falsifying information about my HR record so he could use it to justify terminating the employment of a new mother in the middle of a pandemic. I was so disgusted I stopped being able to eat, my weighting dropping to dangerously anorexic levels. But what was even more painful how he used Carmen to deliver the falsified news to me. I trusted her, making the situation even more disorienting. No matter what, she believed him, even when he changed his story a couple times. When I gathered a group of longtime female colleagues to dissect what had happened and what my next move was, we accepted that my friendship relationship with Carmen was effectively over. I did not expect Carmen to join a bar fight, but I did expect her to accurately report who fired the gun.
A few weeks after our chance encounter I reached out to Carmen to see if she had gained any new perspective. These were not little white lies: they decimated my career, put my family on the ropes, and threatened to tarnish my reputation at work. But I was willing to put effort into repairing our friendship if she could own up to past mistakes. When she got angry that I even brought the matter up, I knew there was no chance of repair.
I have never had a falling out with a female friend, so this was new territory for me. In some ways Gary and Carmen were foils. For all of Gary’s flaws, being hot-tempered and micro-demanding, you knew he always had your back. Carmen was the opposite, the loveliest, most friction-free person to work with, but who clams up at the first whiff of anything unsavory. I still encourage everyone to be Carmen’s friend and colleague. She is a lovely, brilliant person who makes everyone around her smarter. A part of me knows that she recognizes deep down that our boss did something foul but denial can be more comfortable.
Recently I have noticed that my memories of bombastic Gary stand out in technicolor, as if he were still living and I could phone him anytime, while my Carmen memories are already muted and fuzzy, as if she had already faded like an old photograph. We logged so many hours together but she was always demure and withholding, and in many ways I never really knew who she was. I was the “Gary” in our friendship, spouting every unfiltered thought about my personal life. But Carmen kept her personal life under wraps. When she and her partner split I had no inkling they were even on the rocks. Sometimes I asked my husband if I was deluding myself thinking we were actually friends. I had never even been inside her home.
I will always have a soft spot for gentle Carmen and her role in a life-changing decade that launched me from a late-20s partier into a 40-year old mom with a magnificent family and an established research career. I am forever grateful for the “honeymoon†decade I spent working with her, adventuring across Asia, Africa, South America, and Australia. She was a sage advisor and a brilliant scientist who always asked the most incisive questions. I absorbed much from cohabiting her sphere. I will always miss having her around to bounce ideas off, as well as her full-throated laugh, head back, trying not to snarf her cosmopolitan. For more than a decade she was the world’s best work wife and science is not as fun without her.
* * *
It has been especially hard for my family to lose two work pillars in the middle of a destabilizing pandemic. But life marches on. My attention these days is wrapped up in my radiant son Bjorn, who in a few years he will be old enough to be his momma’s date at Caps games. In Gary’s honor we will chat up every salesperson, stadium worker, and fan sitting in our row. Maybe Bjorn will finally get that Kuznetsov jersey.
In Finland’s boreal forests, just above the Arctic Circle, the sprawling Lake Inari is peppered with thousands of small islands. One island known as Graveyard served for centuries as a cemetery for the ancient Sami, Lapland’s semi-nomadic reindeer herders. When the pandemic ends I will journey thousands of miles to spread the last of my father’s ashes around the island’s icy blue waters. Lakes were my father’s nirvana, a trait passed down over generations of Finnish ancestors, and maybe there he will find the peace that eluded him in death.
Three years ago the US embassy in Helsinki phoned our family with shocking news. A hotel maid discovered my 74-year old father’s body crumpled in a desk chair in his room. His colleagues had accepted his explanation that his stomach ailed after Korean food when he skipped his conference. An autopsy report determined otherwise. A simple surgery would have removed his ruptured appendix and saved his life.
But my father had a history of not asking for help. He was a proud, broad-shouldered, heavy drinking ox who rebuffed meddlesome doctors. A few years earlier I had to beg him to visit a hospital for a broken ankle flapping around after a lawn mower incident. He snarled like a bear when friends suggested a simple ointment for the pink fungus spreading like vines from his toes to his groin. I knew better than to try.
Was there a flash of light in his final dying moments when he realized his deadly mistake? Or did he drift into death oblivious as always? Alone in his hotel room, poisons seeping within, did he recognize what a stubborn prideful fool he could be? And that sometimes he needs to ask for help? Did he finally learn if God exists, after concluding so in his recently published philosophy book, God? Very Probably.
The week before Christmas my mother, brother, and I flew to iced-over Helsinki to identify his body and arrange for its cremation and shipment back to the US. My mother picked up his ashes at Dulles Airport in DC and we performed the dance of the American funeral as best we could. My father shunned staged diplomacy more than anything, so we slipped in enough subliminal references to his imperfections to keep the affair authentic.
Fortunately, I had plenty of material to draw on, having legitimately enjoyed my first decade growing up in the most eccentric libertarian family in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Family trips across the American West — and later the world — were wild misadventures where overriding my mother’s hesitations was half the fun. My father was larger than life, cruising past Chevy Chase’s mansions in his beat-up Toyota convertible with the roof down, dangling a gin and tonic on his right and an unused seatbelt on his left, as if daring anyone to stop the shaggy-haired libertarian philosopher-king. My father filled the family dinner table with foreign intellectuals, pumped them with alcohol, and then jovially explained why all their thinking was wrong. My friends were awed by my father’s bravado, strength, and sprawling personal library in our basement. There were at least ten thousand books. With a tanned, bearded face framed by shoulder-length dusty blonde hair, women mistook him for Kris Kristofferson. I thought he was Zeus, all-knowing and all-powerful and thundering whenever he felt slighted. I flew under his radar while I was young and he was preoccupied by his writing and tennis. Only later in high school did I sign up for the high school track team and everything changed.
The Gift
My father was awestruck when his diminutive, squeaky-voiced teenage daughter suddenly could not lose a race, taking the state and county cross country titles as a rookie. My dramatic come-from-behind racing style made for nail-biter finishes and Washington Post headlines. My family was mystified; no one in my family ran except after tennis balls. My father referred to it as the “miracleâ€. Only later did my Finnish grandmother divulge the hidden roots of my success.
She was thrilled to watch her 95-pound granddaughter claim the Maryland state cross country title in a final sloppy sprint across a mud-soaked field to pass the favorite. It had been six decades since she cheered her father Onni race the mile as a professional distance runner in Boston in the 1920s and 1930s. Her uncle Laurie was also a distance runner; as a young girl she handed him oranges along his 26.2-mile journey from Hopkinton to downtown Boston in the early decades of the Boston Marathon. Back then it was still just a gaggle of a couple hundred men. My grandmother explained that Finns ruled distance running at that time. Paavo Nurmi, the “Flying Finn”, won nine Olympic gold medals. Finns claim to have the most guts, which they refer to as “sisu”, cultivated by plunging their naked bodies into freezing lakes through holes carved in the ice between sauna sessions. Sisu was on full display when the Finns thrashed the Soviet army in the Winter War of 1939-1940, where temperatures plunged below -50F. Not only did the underdog Finns block the Soviet empire from expanding westward into Scandinavia, they made the Red Army look pathetic, emboldening Hitler to invade the USSR the following year, expecting it to be a cakewalk. Instead the Germans became mired in a bloody eastern front that allowed the Allies to pierce the west. In many ways we can thank the Finns for bringing down the Nazis.
But when Onni died suddenly of tuberculosis at age thirty-two, Laurie burned his shoes in disgust, blaming his brother’s death on the Finns’ notoriously harsh training regimens for compromising his immune system. He never ran again. Onni’s wife Martha raised my grandmother alone, cleaning bathrooms in factories to make ends meet and settling in a fishing town called Gloucester north of Boston. Martha was still living there by the sea when I was born fifty years later. I called her “Mummu”, which means “grandmother” in Finnish.
My grandmother gifted to me Laurie’s vintage 1920s diamond ring, explaining that I had earned it by racing with sisu. My grandmother lifted me with “Grrlpower” long before it became a meme. I also inherited another power from my grandmother and Mummu. We all had an uncanny knack for finding four-leaf clovers. Years after their deaths I still feel their spirit every time I pluck a mutant clover. I have found thousands in my lifetime, also 5-, 6-, 7-, and 8-leaf clovers. I never find them when I look, only when I glimpse them out of the corner of my eye when I’m busy doing something else, like running down trail or riding a bike. I can’t explain it. I just sense them, the same way I intuitively sensed how to pace myself in distance races.
My initial rise as a runner in high school was virtually unsupported. My parents were so uninvolved they did not even buy me track shoes. I toed the line at my first state championship as the only runner wearing clunky Nike sneakers instead of featherweight spikes. Nor did I get much support from my team, which did not even have the five girls needed to compete as a cross country team. Old Coach Fleming mostly took photographs. Each race I was underprepared, undertrained, and looked like a deer in the headlights. At a state championship where I unexpectedly got my period and had no one to turn to, I shoved piles of toilet paper in my shorts and hoped for the best. But everything changed after I won the state cross country title.
The Self-Appointed Coach
My father was an economist. Economists tend to believe they are the smartest person in the room and try to fix other people’s systems perceived to be suboptimal. When it came to my budding running career, the economist in my father could not leave well enough alone. I watched silently as he pushed ahead without asking me first. I turned red when he tried to extort free sneakers from a Bethesda running store he decided should “sponsor†me. The perplexed pimpled boy at the cash register declined my father’s offer. Nor did he ask for my consent when he signed me up for the Footlocker invitational in New York as a bonus race at the end of my first cross country season.
On the November race morning the Bronx barely cracked twenty degrees. My teeth were chattering. I didn’t want to be there. I was still exhausted after the state championship and fighting a stubborn cold. I needed a break. Shortly after the race began an alien wheezing sound emanated from my chest cavity. On the wooded trails of Van Cortland Park I was alone as I struggled to breathe, with no adults to turn to as I experienced my first terrifying asthma attack. I stopped on the side of the trail until I recovered my breathing. I ran slowly for another two miles to keep the wheezing at bay until I finally crossed the finish line. When I got home I was laid out with feverish pneumonia for weeks, my longest absence from school. When I finally returned to the track I needed an albuterol inhaler prescribed by my doctor. The feeling of suffocation became a metaphor for my relationship with my father.
While I was still laid out my father continued his blitzkrieg, visiting my high school athletic director to demand he replace the doddering old Coach Fleming with a young assistant track coach with a reputation for being a hard-ass. Fleming’s light touch worked well for me, since I was already logging ten hours of travel soccer each week. Chronically underweight and fighting off colds, I was a risk for burnout, especially with my father’s not-so-veiled expectation that I attend Harvard or another elite university.
One night the ABC evening news aired a TV segment “Teens in Trouble” where I delivered a deadpan account of what exhausted teens face on a daily basis, with long hours of juggling school, sports, and homework under intense pressure. I spent the next day in the offices of alarmed school administrators. I fell on my grenade, explaining that the adults in my life made me exhausted, but never suicidal. I ticked each of the administrators’ boxes: I didn’t cut myself, I was skinny but not anorexic or bulimic, no one was hurting me, there were no recent deaths or divorces in my family. I was mortified when teachers took me aside after class to ask in hushed voices if I was okay. In retrospect this was my one opportunity to get outside help. But no one was a trained therapist. No one knew what questions to ask. I was in pure defense mode, trying to kill any embarrassing rumors that I was a troubled teen or that my parents were doing bad things to me.
The Mistake
Warmer spring weather improved my asthma and the next spring I prepared to race the mile at the track and field state championships. I only needed to finish top-4 at regionals to qualify. The month of May is hot and humid in DC and billows of hot steam rose from the track after a morning rain. A few steps into the regional race I felt my silver chain bounce against my collar bone. I had forgotten to remove a Navajo necklace with five colored stones after staying out late with friends the night before. Jewelry was not allowed, so I popped into the infield and unclasped the chain before dashing back onto the track. A line of girls in bright singlets bobbed away around the first turn. As I chased after them I realized how hard it would be to catch up in a race as short as the mile. What an awful way to end a season. I fought back tears. I was still dead last at the halfway point.
But passing the last-place straggler reenergized me. I looped around more runners, clawing my way back into the race. I thundered into the final lap, weaving through a thick pack of racers. I could hear my teammates Alpha and Maduba screaming and pounding on the bleachers. I hurled myself into the final dash to the finish line and barely edged out the fourth place runner, earning the last spot in the state finals. I threw up my hands as if I’d won.
A race official with a clipboard sidled next to me. His large belly protruded over his belt and a cap shaded his eyes. He told me I was disqualified. I was still panting heavily. My coach leapt into the infield to contend the decision. I had worn the necklace for only a couple steps. The only performance affected was mine. But the official stood firm. My glare could have burned a hole through him. Like my father, he had clearly never run a race in his life.
I was prepared for my father to leap into the fray, unleashing one of the fits of rage he displayed on the tennis court. But he stayed put. When I approach my parents at the fence I realized my father’s anger was directed only towards me. He slipped into economist-speak, offering unrealistic solutions engineered for a hypothetical world. You know, if you had really been thinking you would have run back to the start line to take off the necklace. I furrowed my brow, not catching his drift. There’s a rule against wearing jewelry, but I bet there’s no rule against starting a race late. I looked away in disbelief. Actually, your mistake was taking the necklace off in the first place. Probably no one would have even noticed if you hadn’t drawn attention to it. The suggestions kept coming, the whole drive home. Do you have a mental checklist that you go through in your head before every race? It was a solemn dinner at home.
The Downturn
Mistakes are teachable moments and I learned plenty that day: my father only showed affection towards me when I won. There was not even a flicker of warmth for gutting it out when the winds were against me. His friends found it endearing when he trotted me out at cocktail parties to brag about my victories, beaming with fatherly pride. But it was exhausting to have to win races in exchange for parental affection. Behind the scenes he took little interest in my well-being. As a teenager I once called my father from a party asking him for a ride home because I had been drinking beer. He was busy watching tennis and convinced me I was fine to take the wheel.
My father and I were rarely on the same page. He exasperated over the unevenness of my quarter-mile splits in mile races. He thought I was being tentative and timid during my slower third lap, intentionally shoring up reserves for the final fourth lap. But he had never run a race in his life and did not realize that even professionals don’t run even splits. He insisted that I lead every race aggressively from the front and hang on to the lead until I collapsed, even if happened mid-race. “Think of it as an experiment,” he explained. “To test your limits. Don’t lose your nerve.â€
My father had no personal experience with the self-destructive side of distance running or the balancing act I was trying to hold. I felt powerless, like air was leaking out of my tires, and I never won another major race for the remainder of high school. The worse I performed, the more my father harangued me. The situation got even worse when my pubescent body started changing in the later years of high school, exacerbating the disconnect between my evolving physiology and my father’s assumptions. My self-confidence plummeted as I began to blame myself for my body becoming fleshier. One day I exploded into tears in my mother’s office and told her I never wanted to run again.
My father hired a sports psychologist to fix my flagging motivation and growing performance anxiety. It was the first time I met a professional therapist. When he gently asked the right questions I opened up immediately about my relationship with my parents. I was relieved to meet someone who immediately grasped the difficulties I was facing and assured me they were not my fault. But I never met with the therapist again. He couldn’t really help me, as I was not the source of the problem. I hunkered down, became emotionally numbed, and began to count down the days until I left for college.
Fly Little Bird
My father dragged me to every elite university in the country, whether I was interested in going there or not. He arranged interviews with the track coaches, even while I was counting down the days until I never had to run again. We trekked across each campus to find the main library so we could count how many of the political philosophy books he authored were in the catalogue. There was no pretense that the excursion was not really about him.
The only college visit I enjoyed was with my older brother (no parents) to a small liberal arts college in a cozy New England town, where my brother’s friend Jamie was a senior. Amherst College was quaint and focused on undergraduate education, not flaunting Nobel-prize winning faculty. It was nestled in the pine forests of the Pioneer Valley, surrounded by woodland and farmland. I could imagine being happy in the home of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, maybe even running.
My father made me apply early to Harvard instead. He assured me I didn’t have to go. When Harvard mailed my early decision letter in December 1998, my father did not wait for me to get home from school to open it. He snatched the letter and ripped it open himself. The single act summed up our relationship perfectly.
I did not end up going to Harvard, or Amherst, or any school on the east coast. I fled to the west coast to Stanford University. The school had the distinct advantages of (a) pleasing my father, (b) being thousands of miles away, and (c) never recruiting me to run. I couldn’t wait to exchange track spikes for flip-flops. But I never took off Laurie’s ring.
Second Act
Kicking back and soaking up rays on the laid-back west coast was supposed to make me feel less anxious. A Stanford degree was supposed to make me feel set for life. Instead I felt listless. I had scampered west like a frightened deer, driven into a corner. It was time to be the hunter.
Everyone assumed I lost my mind when I left Stanford after my first year. My stunned California friends thought Amherst was a community college. Confusing Maryland and Massachusetts (too many little east coast states), they believed I was returning home to have a nervous breakdown. I didn’t bother explaining myself to anyone. I twirled Laurie’s ring around my fourth finger and for the first time did precisely what I wanted.
There is no experience as liberating as dashing at top speed through fields and woods. I became the fastest distance runner on the Amherst track and cross country teams, finishing All-America at Nationals. But I was circumspect and scanned for signs that my coach was actually invested in my general well-being, rather than winning at all costs. The Saturday after the 9/11 attacks would turn into a type of empathy exam, which he flunked.
My coach could not understand why I was so personally shaken by the 9/11 attacks that I could not race at our cross country meet at Williams College four days later. I had not personally lost any loved ones. The other women on the team were all lacing up. I did not know how to explain to him why I felt shell shocked. The entire world had changed in the blink of an eye and I couldn’t care less about racing. He took it personally. I was belittling him and shirking my obligations to my teammates. He instructed me to stop being a prima donna and suit up. Shortly after the gun went off I faded to the back and dropped out. He lost it.
Being yelled at while you’re numb and shell shocked is a surreal experience. I recall crying and a creepy hand jerking my shoulder while he yelled and spat in my face while I stood half-naked in my race bikini bottoms. But I mostly remember feeling numb and strangely not caring.
My shell shock dissipated a week later, but my relationship with my coach never healed. I finished out the season, leading the team to a best-ever 7th place finish at Nationals, but the red flags kept coming. One day I asked my coach if I could wear shorts like the boys instead of the bikini bottoms. I told him I would feel more comfortable and promised to run just as fast. After all, it was a small concession in a body-conscious culture where eating disorders are a huge problem for developing girl runners. One of my teammates had been hospitalized.
He rebuffed my request, retorting that Women don’t look good in shorts. I had no more questions. My inquiry was over. I quit the team and trained on my own to run my first marathon in 2003. Winding through the five boroughs of New York City, I blew a kiss to Puff Daddy as I passed him. I was under-trained and after the race I spent a few hours at Beth Israel hospital with an IV in my forearm. But I couldn’t wait to do another. I was finally running on my own terms.
Adulting
But even as an adult my father still could not give me space to break away and lead my own life. When I landed a summer internship in Moscow at the US State Department my junior year at Amherst, my father insisted on tagging along. I objected vehemently to his plan to rent an apartment in Moscow for the whole summer. He couldn’t even read the Cyrillic alphabet. I was just beginning to get past my recurring nightmares of him drowning me in a pond scattered with lily pads in upstate New York. I implored my mother to intervene. But he never listened to either of us. Fortunately the US embassy had mountains of security and visiting me was difficult. But the nightmares continued into my twenties.
After graduating college and backpacking around Southeast Asia with a high school friend I settled back in DC to begin a career in global health policy at the RAND think-tank. I wanted to craft US policy to help children in developing countries. But I ran into a headwind. My father was a professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy and there was too much overlap. I quickly pivoted to biology, wagering that my father’s complete lack of knowledge of organisms and cells might keep his fingers out of my work. I was lousy at biology labs at Amherst, but I was willing to do anything where I had space. I met a brilliant professor at Penn State and left to begin a PhD program in virus evolution.
“Why aren’t you going to Harvard?†my father inquired when I told him of my plans. Before I could muster a response he answered himself, “Well, I guess you’d be a nobody at Harvard.â€
By that time I more easily brushed his comments aside. He may be an esteemed full professor but he was also a man who once kept a rubber band around his wrist to floss his teeth in restaurants.
Eddie was the biology department’s prized recruit from Oxford University. He did not mince words or suffer fools. He intimidated students — and faculty, for that matter. We worked well together and I completed my doctoral dissertation in record time. My friends were all on 5- or 6-year tracks, but I published enough papers to graduate after 3.
But one day I faltered. After being awarded the $4,000 departmental prize for the best dissertation, the committee had discovered a blemish in my record: a big fat “F†for a 1-credit seminar that I simply never attended. My GPA was still high, but the optics were bad. The chair informed me that the prize was rescinded and given to another student, my nemesis. I tiptoed to Eddie’s door, bracing for a thrashing.
When I blurted out my mishap Eddie laughed out loud. “What a farce!†He lamented that I lost the money. In his matter-of-fact British tone he brainstormed ways to fix the F by writing a research paper on a seminar topic. But in the end we decided it wasn’t worth it. By graduating early I would soon be making twice the income of grad students anyway.
I had finally found a man to oversee me who was reasonable, fair, cared about my well-being, and helped me reach my potential. I felt a twinge of remorse when I left so soon for the National Institutes of Health to begin a postdoc.
White Knight
The NIH happens to be located 10 minutes from my parents’ home in Maryland. Back in the family orbit I began to regress. Then I finally met Aaron.
Aaron and I dated a few months before he announced that there was a problem. He was not okay with me letting my intoxicated father drive me homeI after regular Monday night dinner with my parents. I was confused. Drinking and driving was normalized in our family. My early childhood memories are sitting shotgun while my father drove with a gin in his hand. Even today, the scent of gin reminds me of breezy summer car rides. The car ride was supposed to be my one-on-one bonding time with my father. I relayed his objection to my mother, but neither of us acted.
But when Aaron did not waver, my mom took the keys. She was not going to drive away the first nice Jewish boy willing to put up with her moody daughter. Eventually I recognized that Aaron was not being stubborn or difficult. I was just witnessing something novel: protection from someone who cared about me. A few years later my father passed out driving home from a party, drifted across the double lane, and crashed into a fire hydrant on the left side of DC’s Oregon Avenue. He was still passed out when cops found him.
Aaron continued to shatter my belief system. Our first summer dating we both ran the Highland Sky 40 mile trail race in West Virginia. He won handily but I had stomach problems and dropped out after 32 miles. The next morning I forlornly flew to California convinced I would never see Aaron again. He was the stud, I was the dud. I strolled along the beaches of Santa Barbara wistfully watching the pelicans dive, accepting that I had blown it. I was stunned when I returned to DC to find Aaron’s demeanor towards me unchanged. My mind had to do somersaults to grasp that I had not fallen off some pedestal. He was even more flabbergasted that I thought we were done because I flubbed a race. He didn’t understand my guilt and shame.
Over time Aaron became acquainted with my father and began to grasp the roots of my curious outlooks. Whenever I started to disparage myself, Aaron would call me out for intoning the voice of my father. Disparagement came so reflexively it was nearly automatic. We referred to it as my brain chip. I set radically different standards for myself and my friends, whom I never judged based on superficial performances. Aaron helped me set boundaries with my father (the drunk driving was just a metaphor for everything else). My father easily steamrolled me, but generally deferred to Aaron’s requests. My father liked Aaron because he fixed his computer and A/V problems and was willing to engage in heated political debates that the rest of the family had tired of. Aaron didn’t mind being “fresh blood”.
At times I tried to repair relations with my father and broach some of the difficulties I faced in high school. How it felt to have my legs cut out from under me. But he would brush me off, never wanting to revisit “water under the bridgeâ€, the same way he never addressed his own problems with his father, which haunted him to his last breath. When I leave this earth I don’t want to be carrying that kind of baggage. Some people will think it excessive to travel thousands of miles to dump my father’s ashes in a remote lake at the ends of the earth, but they have no inkling of the distance I’ve already traveled.
The other day I uncovered a box buried in the closet of my childhood bedroom. Inside was a pair of girls track spikes, grey with a purple Nike swoosh. I turned the shoes over, pressing my fingers against the tiny metal fangs. Twenty years ago, the spikes were sharp enough to draw blood. But time smooths everything, and hopefully by remembering the mistake I made quit running after high school I could stop myself from quitting science as well.
Winning the 1996 state championship by a hair
No one was more shocked than I when I won the state cross country title in high school. As a sophomore I became one of the DC area’s promising young runners. But by senior year, it seemed my star had faded. I fought to preserve my 95-pound pixie frame, but as my female body morphed, it became my enemy. I was not alone. Over the last forty years, sixteen girls in grades 9-11 won the national high school cross country championship but never won again. The number of boys in this category: zero. Girls are not less driven. But as testosterone kicks in, boys get stronger and faster. As estrogen increases body fat, girls fall into destructive cycles of dieting and overtraining. I dreamt of following in the footsteps of my Finnish great-grandfather, a professional distance runner, and his brother who ran the Boston Marathon in the 1930s. But the dream faded with each race I lost and ultimately I decided not to run in college.
My Finnish great-grandfather Onni Palonen
An 18-month break from stopwatches was the salve I needed. One summer I discovered a purer form of solo trail running in the deserts of New Mexico. The brutal sun made it far too hot to run fast. I learned to focus on other things: open skies, fanciful cacti, speeding lizards. Rejuvenated, I joined the college cross country team as a junior and dropped minutes off my 5k to finish All-America. I realized that girls do not need to be pixies, their bodies just need time to adjust. After college I competed in road races, fulfilling my dream to finish top-50 at the Boston Marathon as my grandmother watched from the same corner where she cheered her uncle 70 years earlier. Next I discovered trail races and ultramarathons, the ultimate adventure. In hindsight, adolescence was a temporary phase, a blip. I wish I could have told my teenage self to go easier on myself before I nearly skipped out on a lifetime of adventures.
Tetons, Montana
Manitou’s Revenge 54-mile race, New York
Twenty years later, I am entering a second life phase that derails many talented women. When I decided to have my first child, I was hellbent on not letting it interfere with my dream job as an infectious disease epidemiologist at the National Institutes of Health using next-generation sequence data to save the world from pandemics. I hauled my eight-month pregnant belly across the Atlantic to give a talk at a virus evolution conference. I finished journal article proofs on my iPhone between labor contractions at the hospital, until my husband locked it away. I knew something like COVID-19 was just a sneeze away.
Sitting alone in my living room, I wondered how I was expected to simultaneously contend with a job loss, a global pandemic, a childcare crisis, combined with geographical inflexibility that made finding a new job seem hopeless. I began reaching out to colleagues in science policy and journalism to find an alternate career path. My boss’s words kept ringing: You had a good run, but it’s time to pass the torch. I had not been so tempted to abandon a dream since boxing my track shoes.
Several female scientists I know who left research after children later admitted they came to regret the decision, even if it felt forced on them at the time. Nothing replaces the thrill of a new scientific discovery. Recalling how I relinquished my running career just because I hit a totally predictable bump during normal female development helped me avoid repeating the same mistake as a scientist. Instead, I regrouped and found a needle-in-a-haystack position in another branch of the NIH. This fall I’ll head to a new office just as my toddler begins his first day of preschool. Larger kids will surely push him down and snatch his toys, but I’ll share with him a dirty secret that his mom takes the same punches at work. It’s nothing to be ashamed of and whimpering and telling a teacher only brings more trouble. Better to just dust off, redirect, and we’ll find new adventures together.
Realistically, over the decades there has been little change in the competitive systems of distance running and scientific research that spontaneously break young women as they naturally go through rocky transitions, and I have little expectation of future progress. My initial instinct to escape two systems that broke me was based in self-preservation. But I’ve learned, twice now, that quitting is not the right answer and that conditions can improve just as quickly as they deteriorate. In the end, what felt like a career earthquake turned out to be a short detour, just like adolescence as a runner. My experience roaring back as an adult runner gives me renewed confidence that getting flattened can signal the beginnings of a career, not the finish line. Over the next decades my scientific colleagues and I will be working to make sure our children never live through something like COVID-19 again. Or at least die trying.
On October 27, 2019 I made the biggest mistake of my running career. Yes, worse than the time I accidentally wore jewelry at a track race, disqualifying me from the state meeting and ending my high school season. Worse than the time I listened to Keith’s advice to run my first ultramarathon, Laurel Highlands 50k, ‘just like a marathon’. Worse than the time I ran my first trail race, the 18-mile Escarpment Trail Run, in July heat without a water bottle. Yes, worse than drinking margaritas after the inaugural WUS beer mile.
There were mistakes all around at the Inaugural WUS Beer Mile
What did I do this time? I skipped the Tussey MountainBack 50-mile relay race, breaking a 14-year streak. I am still trying to dig myself out of the asteroid-sized hole that followed. And break the curse.
I had a reasonable rationale for skipping Tussey in 2019. The race fell on the same day as DC’s Marine Corps Marathon. I had just gotten my speed back after having my first child in July 2018. I was getting older (38) and not sure how many fast sub-3 hour marathons I still had in me. I wanted to give myself one last crack at glory on my city’s biggest race stage. I knew I had it in me to podium. I took training seriously. I joined a Wednesday morning track group. I did multiple long runs. A few weeks before the race I beat a field of very quick ladies at the Trilogy Half Marathon, setting a CR.
Sean warned me.
But fixating on races is not very marmot. Sean called me out when I visited him in Colorado a few months prior. I wasn’t acting like myself. I was taking running too seriously. I was wearing a Garmin. I was doing all the things Sean and I make fun of other runners for. I admitted I was mystified by my sudden fixation on Marine Corps. But after 18 months of being pregnant and then a new mom and out of the racing game I was bursting at the seams to race again. The age 40 was looming ahead and I was afraid of getting older. My speed would soon fade and I wanted one last stand before the axe fell. I wanted to give my legs the fitness to go full throttle.
One of our MountainBack teams
I sometimes grumble about Aaron’s decades-long racings streaks at Hellgate and the Boston Marathon. Every year before Hellgate I ask him if he’s sure he doesn’t just want to do the Magnus Gluteus Christmas 50k Fun-Run with me instead. Wouldn’t that be more fun? Doesn’t it get old doing the same races over and over again? Whenever he pointed out that I had my own 14-year streak at Tussey MountainBack I countered that it wasn’t a race, it was a party, more like a homecoming. It was just about reuniting with State College friends I made when as a grad student at Penn State. Plus I ran different legs every year.
Aaron misses all the fun at MGM
But this is totally worth it
But I get it now. I understand why streaks should never be broken, how races become woven into a person’s DNA and make you feel whole. There is a reason I return to Tussey year after year, even a decade after I relocated to DC. It is the perfect race, encapsulating every reason I run. It’s a party in van all day with friends. It’s the hardest lung-breaker of a course I’ve ever done (try sprinting 5k up a mountain and then doing in again a couple hours later, with someone fast on your heels). The course is lined with the beautiful fall foliage of the Rothrock forest. The adrenaline is spiked by bitter (but always friendly) competition between rival teams that sometimes finish the 50-mile course seconds apart. I’ve never found any event that makes me run so hard, while grinning ear-to-ear.
Running during 2012’s Dr Seuss-themed year for ‘Green Kegs and Damn I Love Hills’
The 2019 Marine Corps Marathon was one of the most dismal days of my life. Physically, I have felt much worse, like when I’m throwing up during an ultramarathon. My finish wasn’t terrible, 3:06 for 12th overall woman. But psychologically I have never felt less motivated to cross a finish line. If a legion of imposing Marines hadn’t been there to pounce on me I would have veered to the side and not crossed at all. Had Aaron not been there to grab my finger I would have erased all trace of the race from my Garmin. By mile 2 I knew my busted Achilles would give me no lift off and I just had to go through the motions. I felt spiritually broke, knowing that I should have been at Tussey that day with my friends, not on some tilting-at-windmills mission to stand on a podium while some stranger snaps my photo. None of my State College friends had given me a hard time. But I realized I had gotten caught up in an empty fantasy. And the misery at Marine Corps was not just about losing a race, or running my first marathon over 3 hours in more than a decade, but losing sight of what was sacred to me about running. I felt corrupted.
Bjorn finally got me to crack a smile at MCM
After the race I tried to recover my sunken spirit by taking horseback riding lessons at Rock Creek Horse Center. Riding had been my childhood joy. In my evaluation lesson I beamed with happiness as I took a pony over a course of jumps. I felt like my old self again. The following week the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the world changed forever. At my next lesson my horse, potentially sensing people’s pandemic angst, bolted and bucked uncontrollably and I was thrown backwards, smashing my skull into the ground. Thankfully I was wearing a helmet or I would be dead. I blacked out and regained consciousness minutes before the ambulance arrived. I had memory lapses for weeks and the point of impact on the back of my head is still tender to the touch, but luckily there seems to be no long term damage. Just as I began to regain normal brain function and resume my work duties studying the SARS-CoV-2 virus I was unexpectedly let go from my job. I won’t go into the details but it was messy and cynical and exposed why women drop out of science like flies, particularly after starting families. I felt like the dominos were falling so quickly, and every time my toddler dashed into the street I was certain the next calamity would involve him. I begged Aaron to drop everything and flee to Europe, or frankly anywhere I could start fresh and our family could be safe. Maybe I could find a little hamlet in the countryside where we could raise a family, study pathogens, and keep some goats.
I tried to convince Aaron he’d like Belgium.
Aaron and I are a well-matched pair because in every way that I am romantic he is grounded and practical. Whenever I feel buffeted I have learned to tuck safely behind Aaron and trust him when he says everything is going to be alright. That kind of blind trust came in handy during last Sunday’s race, when my disoriented and severely dehydrated mind lost touch with reality but agreed to follow him down a very rocky trail, following what has become our well-worn team survival strategy for getting through 2020.
I knew my path to redemption needed to begin in Pennsylvania’s Rothrock forest. I did not expect to skip my way to victory at last Sunday’s Rothrock Trail Challenge 25k. I just had to put down the first spike. After much discussion, Aaron and I decided to run the race together. During the first half he was feeling bad and crimping my style, but I chirped along happily behind him and decided a relaxed day in the gorgeous mountains was still a pretty awesome day. Rothrock is fantastic course, rocky and steep, full of adventure, in some ways like the Dolly Sodds but without the plains or mud. The temperature was in the 80s with a strong sun and I filled my bottle at the 9-mile aid station with Gatorade. Going up the next Cliffs of Insanity section I started having stabbing pains in my stomach that radiated up my spine. Running down the rock garden trails felt like daggers. Just as Aaron started to get a second wind I fell silent. I started throwing up fluorescent yellow Gatorade. The heat intensified, but I couldn’t drink because of the pain, and the last couple hours I started to lose the plot.
After we missed a turn and went off course I suggested I crawl into a fetal position at the next forest road we crossed and Aaron could scoop me up with the car after he finished. I used to be fearless, bombing down rocky trails with abandon. I confidently bounced through rock gardens in the Dolly Sodds while pregnant. But the past year has made me feel so vulnerable and skittish — the concussion, my boss yanking the rug out from under my professional career, a global pandemic, as well as a new mother’s terror as Bjorn scrambles up rocks and sprints into the street. I feel shaken up and am actively trying to retrain my brain not to see threats all around. As I tottered along rocky trails with a mind that not so stable from dehydration, I was genuinely scared that something really bad would happen to me.
After the final descent we popped out onto a short eighth-of-a-mile stretch of road leading to the finish. A friendly woman yelled for us as we ran by and her energy momentarily lifted my stride. It was too much. I started puking in the bushes again. After we finished Aaron raced off to rescue Bjorn’s babysitter, who was thankfully unperturbed that we were later than expected. I lay in the grass and downed a Pepsi that tasted better than anything I’ve drunk in my life.
Rothrock’s Whipple Dam
As Aaron described the race to a friend: ‘In the end, it was like 2020: we barely hung on, but through some good teamwork, we got it done even if it was a bit uglier then we would have liked.’
The year 2019 was not just the end of a decade, but an end of an era for the WUSsies, with the sale of the WUS house in August. Sure, it hasn’t really been the ‘WUS house’ in ages. But it’s symbolic. WUS has also had to survive the arrival of the babes. Those little poop machines sure put a dent in a running schedule. You can tell the new parents by their glazed eyes and resigned responses to How are you doing? As one of those dead-eyed new parents, I’m totally out of the loop and surely missed some big WUS events. But, I have survived 2019 by sticking tight to the motto that a poor attempt is better than no attempt at all, so here it goes:
Future WUS Bull Run Team?
Best Performance, Surprise WUS Appearance: Brit Z
Worst Performance, Surprise WUS Appearance: Julian J.
